I've been following the Ultimate Weapon Tutorial - by Tim Bergholz. And it is a very great tutorial with a lot of new techniques and tips but i'm stuck at the baking part in substance painter and before diving into the problems and what I have tried I want to share what i did before taking the model to substance painter for baking.

* I'm a Maya user so when Tim was using the smoothing groups in 3DS Max it was something new to me and after doing some research the conclusion was that Maya only have soften/ harden edge only and no such thing as smoothing groups, so I did soften all the edges and left the seems edges hard.

The highlighted edges (orange ) I made them Hard and the rest of the edges ( light blue ) I made them soft

is what i did correct and is it equivalent to the smoothing groups in 3Ds Max ?? and is doing this important ??

after doing that I exported the model into substance painter and started baking and here is my naming, uvs and low/high poly before baking

The lowpoly naming in the outliner and everything ends with ( _low)

The highpoly naming in the outliner and everything ends with ( _high)

The lowpoly model

Wireframe

The highpoly model

Wireframe

the loypoly/Highpoly placement

The UVS

and now I will show you guys the baking settings and what I face when I bake, note that i'm using substance painter 2017.3.3.

when I import the low poly (FBX) these are the settings

and when I want to bake I just followed what Mr.Tim did in the tutorial and used the same settings

when I press bake I noticed I get this warning so i"m not sure if this have anything to do with the bake result??

After baking the first problem I noticed that the floaters elements are not baked

and its like this for the other floaters as well.

On the other side I have this strange looking color on the screws and that piece

Also I noticed these wired artifacts on the model , its not smooth and looks very harsh

I'm sorry if the post is long , but i put everything in detail so when you guys help me it easier for you to find the problem and solve it.

First of all sorry for the delay to reply this, daily life changed since 2 weeks ago and that has impact on my availability here
Anyway, finally here to check out what is going on

Uhmm...I must say that I don't use Maya but I do know indeed that it doesn't have smoothing groups...
So that could make things a little complicated as from Max I know that smoothing groups are very important (Smoothing groups from UV shells) in order to get good bakes :O

But, I noticed that there was 1 thing which is not correct at the moment; And it probably is the cause of the hard edges on the corners like you show in the last images:
In the baker settings, make sure to enable "Average normals", that should hopefully solve that

For the smoothing related thing & working with Maya for Substance Painter, at this moment I'm not entirely sure what to do, but I did some googling and remembered this video from Allegorithmic:
It is about preparing your models to bake, and they use Maya in there as well. Perhaps it contains some valuable information for you?

Regarding those strange brighter objects: Is it possible that these are flipped (flipped normals)? Not sure if this is the case, but flipped normals usually cause crazy things like this^^

First of all sorry for the delay to reply this, daily life changed since 2 weeks ago and that has impact on my availability here
Anyway, finally here to check out what is going on

Uhmm...I must say that I don't use Maya but I do know indeed that it doesn't have smoothing groups...
So that could make things a little complicated as from Max I know that smoothing groups are very important (Smoothing groups from UV shells) in order to get good bakes :O

But, I noticed that there was 1 thing which is not correct at the moment; And it probably is the cause of the hard edges on the corners like you show in the last images:
In the baker settings, make sure to enable "Average normals", that should hopefully solve that

For the smoothing related thing & working with Maya for Substance Painter, at this moment I'm not entirely sure what to do, but I did some googling and remembered this video from Allegorithmic:
It is about preparing your models to bake, and they use Maya in there as well. Perhaps it contains some valuable information for you?

Regarding those strange brighter objects: Is it possible that these are flipped (flipped normals)? Not sure if this is the case, but flipped normals usually cause crazy things like this^^

I'm really really sorry to take up your time and I really appreciate your help

for the smoothing groups what I did was right and I confirmed that after watching the video you posted , so thanks for that

I enable "Average normals and rebaked again and the result is better but there is few things to notice

1- for some reason the floaters are not baking at all.
2 - there is now this weird sliver color on some screws and that piece

3- some more weird artifacts

4 - more of these

5 - I doubled cheeked with my normals on these objects and its correct but they are still the same

Glad to read one of the problems is solved, and that the video confirmed some stuff for you!

Now into the other problems; Some weird stuff indeed, and for the floaters you made sure the naming convention has exactly the same same as the highpoly model where it should be projected on?
These days I personally don't use floaters anymore, I use Substance Painter to stamp my details on there, that might be a workaround in case it really doesn't bake your floaters
For that you can just create an alpha texture with the detail you like ^^

For the strange, bright areas and the ones with crazy shading: Something you might want to check is your UV's; If you have any overlapping this will cause trouble; You need to move the duplicate(s) out of the 0-1 space by 1 texture unit Beware though: Another possibility is that you moved all the shells for e.g. those screws outside the 0-1 space, thus not being considered during the baking process You might want to check that out It's kinda difficult to judge without looking into the file and experimenting myself, but I hope this information could provide you some info

Glad to read one of the problems is solved, and that the video confirmed some stuff for you!

Now into the other problems; Some weird stuff indeed, and for the floaters you made sure the naming convention has exactly the same same as the highpoly model where it should be projected on?
These days I personally don't use floaters anymore, I use Substance Painter to stamp my details on there, that might be a workaround in case it really doesn't bake your floaters
For that you can just create an alpha texture with the detail you like ^^

For the strange, bright areas and the ones with crazy shading: Something you might want to check is your UV's; If you have any overlapping this will cause trouble; You need to move the duplicate(s) out of the 0-1 space by 1 texture unit Beware though: Another possibility is that you moved all the shells for e.g. those screws outside the 0-1 space, thus not being considered during the baking process You might want to check that out It's kinda difficult to judge without looking into the file and experimenting myself, but I hope this information could provide you some info

Hi Laggtastic,hope you are haveing a good day??

almost all of the problems are solved , I sat and tried to fix what I can fix and i'm left with these problems.

The baking seems to be pixelated or faded

and the second problem is there is this grey color appearing on the model

and the last problem is some of the objects are transparent like these screws

really cant thank you enough for your help, and because of that we are almost done and getting closer to the ideal bake, thank a lot

Finally having some time to properly reply your questions, at least...I hope it's proper haha^^

1: Pixels 'n "faded" things:
Hmm, I can not see on your screenshot at which resolution you are viewing your model right now, could it be that you view it in 2K? Try setting the viewer resolution to 4K to see the full res baked textures
Regarding the faded text: Same thing; Could be resolution thing; Also: Try rotating the light; Sometimes things might look faded because of the angle you are looking at it/the lightdirection

2: These artifacts seem to me to be a result of some overlapping UV's; The shapes that appear clearly don't belong there so I have the feeling that there is some other object's normal information being baked on the wrong places In 3Ds Max we have a tool in the unwrap editor to show Overlapping faces which help us to target those; And I found out Maya has that as well;https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/ ... C-htm.html

Could you check that you have no overlap at all?

3: This seems to be a case of flipped polygons to me; As a matter of fact they are not transparant, just turned inside out^^
At least, that's what I think, by the looks of it. I suggest you to double check those polygons if they are indeed flipped or not (which is generally caused when mirroring, or simply by accicent while modelling).

Hope these things might help, perhaps it doesn't work but judging on the screenshots, these are things that came up to my mind

Finally having some time to properly reply your questions, at least...I hope it's proper haha^^

1: Pixels 'n "faded" things:
Hmm, I can not see on your screenshot at which resolution you are viewing your model right now, could it be that you view it in 2K? Try setting the viewer resolution to 4K to see the full res baked textures
Regarding the faded text: Same thing; Could be resolution thing; Also: Try rotating the light; Sometimes things might look faded because of the angle you are looking at it/the lightdirection

2: These artifacts seem to me to be a result of some overlapping UV's; The shapes that appear clearly don't belong there so I have the feeling that there is some other object's normal information being baked on the wrong places In 3Ds Max we have a tool in the unwrap editor to show Overlapping faces which help us to target those; And I found out Maya has that as well;https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/ ... C-htm.html

Could you check that you have no overlap at all?

3: This seems to be a case of flipped polygons to me; As a matter of fact they are not transparant, just turned inside out^^
At least, that's what I think, by the looks of it. I suggest you to double check those polygons if they are indeed flipped or not (which is generally caused when mirroring, or simply by accicent while modelling).

Hope these things might help, perhaps it doesn't work but judging on the screenshots, these are things that came up to my mind

hello. first of all thanks a lot for your help and for the past two days I was testing and fixing the issues and everything is solved but the pixelated problem and I did some test and I made sure that my texel density for the UV is 2k and yet it is pixelated so I think I will just keep on working with that because I wasted enough time on tying to get the perfect bake. but one last question how to set the viewer resolution to 4K in substance painter ??

You can change the viewer resolution under "Textureset Settings", I made a screenshot and in this example you see the current resolution is 2048; The "Size" is the resolution which will show up in your viewer
If I'm not mistaken you baked your maps in 4k, so you should notice significant improvement when setting this resolution to 4k if it's on 2k now

You can change the viewer resolution under "Textureset Settings", I made a screenshot and in this example you see the current resolution is 2048; The "Size" is the resolution which will show up in your viewer
If I'm not mistaken you baked your maps in 4k, so you should notice significant improvement when setting this resolution to 4k if it's on 2k now

Thanks a lot for your help, I have learned a lot from you and can't express my gratitude to you for helping me .

This was a big learning experience, thank you and thanks to Tim for the amazing tutorial.